Characterization of deciliation-regeneration process of Tetrahymena Pyriformis for cellular robot fabrication

Abstract

Artificial magnetotactic Tetrahymena pyriformis GL (T. pyriformis) cells were created by the internalization of iron oxide nano particles and became controllable with a time-varying external magnetic field. Thus, T. pyriformis can be utilized as a cellular robot to conduct micro-scale tasks such as transportation and manipulation. To complete these tasks, loading inorganic or organic materials onto the cell body is essential, but functionalization of the cell membrane is obstructed by their motile organelles, cilia. Dibucaine HCl, a local anesthetic, removes the cilia from the cell body, and the functional group would be absorbed more efficiently during cilia regeneration. In this paper, we characterize the recovery of artificial magnetotactic T. pyriformis after the deciliation process to optimize a cellular robot fabrication process. After sufficient time to recover, the motility rate and the average velocity of the deciliated cells were six and ten percent lower than that of non-deciliated cells, respectively. We showed that the motile cells after recovery can still be controlled using magnetotaxis, making T. pyriformis a good candidate to be used as a cellular robot.

Three-dimensional control of engineered motile cellular microrobots

“…To prevent the cells from moving and obtain accurate intensity profiles, a deciliation process [14] was used. 0.5 mM dibucaine HCl (Sigma Aldrich) is introduced to T. pyriformis culture at a ratio of 1:9.…”

“…Non-motile T. pyriformis was obtained through a deciliation process [14] described in Section II-B. When deciliated cells are placed on the glass slide, most of the cells settle on the bottom because they lost their motility.…”

Galvanotactic behavior ofTetrahymena pyriformisunder electric fields

“…Using a similar system, a real-time feedback control system was implemented using vision-based tracking and a rapidly exploring random tree algorithm [4]. The motile organelles were also stripped off the cell body using a deciliation technique with a local anesthetic [5]. Stripping the body of its cilia would allow for modification and functionalization with other inorganic (shovel, pushing structures, grippers) or organic (drugs, other organisms) loads.…”